Kenneth Minogue was one of a group of thinkers — among them the Austrian
economist Friedrich Hayek, Michael Oakeshott, Bill and Shirley Letwin, Noel
Malcolm, and Roger Scruton — who bolstered the policies of Margaret Thatcher
by providing an articulate and sometimes persuasive intellectual
justification for her often caustic conservative and libertarian views.
Minogue’s eloquent and frequently hilarious assaults on the lazy thinking
that underpinned the crumbling social democratic postwar consensus also
acted as a prompt for the Labour Party under Tony Blair to abandon many of
its traditional policies and embrace elements of Thatcherism.